As Bright as Heaven(5)

Fred’s house, he tells us, was built in 1885 and was a banker’s home. The banker and his family had only lived there for a year when he was offered a prestigious position at a bank out west. At the time, Fred worked for an undertaker across town whose family had started out in the furniture-making business as so many undertakers had, but he was ready to strike out on his own. He convinced a wealthy friend to lend him the money to buy the banker’s house, and he opened Bright Funeral Home. He was one of the first in the city to offer funeral and embalming services at his place of business, rather than making house calls to the homes of the deceased. It isn’t always convenient to prepare the dead at home or lay them out afterward, especially when the houses and living quarters in the city are small. Fred arranged a lovely and spacious ground-floor parlor for viewing, and for embalming to take place privately in one of his back rooms, rather than at the deceased’s bedside. The business had thrived and Fred was able to pay back his friend within three years’ time. That he had done so well was only partially due to his smarts as a businessman, Fred says. There are always people needing an undertaker, even in the best of times.

It seems we’ve no sooner gotten ourselves settled inside the Overland than the three-storied house comes into view. The main entrance is on a corner of Chestnut Street—a long, busy boulevard with tall buildings, storefronts, and other homes on both sides. A secondary entrance is located around the side of the house on a slightly less active street.

The house is dove gray stone with trim the color of cream turning to butter. Scrollwork and carvings the shade of a ripe rhubarb stalk decorate the dormers and topmost gables, and stained-glass transoms in the upper-story windows glisten like gemstones. If it had been in the open countryside instead of mere feet away from the apartment building next to it, the house surely would have had a wraparound porch that frothed with forsythia and beds of hyacinth and crocus in the springtime. The building next to it is so close, there is nary room for a person to pass in between them. As I look up at it from the car window, it is the most elegant house I’ve ever seen, even set against a colorless sky that hints of snow.

We turn the corner onto the side street and into a carriage shelter that sits behind the house. Fred parks the Overland next to an even blacker Cadillac, which seems as long as a city block. The funeral coach. As we get out of the Overland, I can see that the second entrance to the house has a smaller stoop than the front but a wider doorway. It is an odd shape, this second doorway, and I realize this is where the bodies are carted inside and caskets rolled out.

The driver he’d paid to bring our cases and trunks from the train station pulls into the side yard, too, and Uncle Fred tells him to unload everything on the back stoop. He explains that he has a boy from across the street coming to haul them upstairs at the noon hour.

“Let’s go around to the front, then,” Uncle Fred says when we are all out of the car. “That’s a better entrance for Pauline and the girls, and I’d actually prefer you ladies use that one.”

Uncle Fred says this kindly enough. He is, in fact, a genial man. I’ve met him only twice before; he came to Quakertown for Thomas’s and my wedding, and he came again some years later when Thomas’s mother died. I could tell both times that he dotes on Thomas, and Thomas has always spoken tenderly of his uncle. I think by the time Thomas came along, Fred figured he would never marry, and he decided he’d heap any affections he might have had for a family of his own on his brother’s youngest child. As I see the two of them now walking side by side, there is a resemblance between uncle and nephew that I had not fully appreciated until today. Both have high cheekbones, a slender nose, and coffee brown eyes, just like Thomas’s father, Eli—Fred’s younger brother—has. Fred is slightly taller than Thomas and Eli but not by much. My husband could easily pass as Fred’s own offspring, and that must be a comfort to Fred now that he is in his twilight years. Thomas is a fair representative of what could have been had Fred married and fathered a son. Eli said as much to Thomas when he told his father we were leaving. Though he would miss us, Eli was happy not only for us, but also for his older brother, Fred, who would live out his remaining years with family all around him.

I’d always been able to picture Fred expertly handling the delicate affairs of the bereaved with his low, comforting voice and a gray beard that is more curls than wires. Yet now I see by the way he said what he did about the two doors that despite his affection for Thomas, he thought long and hard about offering his nephew this position. Fred had decided that while his house is indeed going to be our new home, there will be restrictions for the girls and me with regard to the business. The bit about the doors is perhaps just the first one to be mentioned. As we follow him to the front of the house, I sense within me an immediate uneasiness about these restrictions. Fred wants to isolate the girls and me from the necessities and peculiarities of his job. I want the girls to have that kind of protection, of course, but I myself don’t want it. I can’t have it. The main reason I have come here is to shuffle Death back to the place where it belongs. That won’t happen if I never get to tangle with it. I must find a way to insert myself into the goings-on at the back of the house.

Six marble steps lead from the boulevard’s sidewalk to the entrance. A gilded sign fringed with tiny icicles and bearing the inscription Bright Funeral Home, Frederick Bright, Proprietor hangs on a brass plate from the stoop’s roof, which is a decorated affair with more of the rhubarb-colored curlicues and carvings. Just below Fred’s name are the words Deliveries to the Rear.